If you only listened to hand-wringing adults, you would think that college students are having tons of sex with semi-anonymous partners, and most of them – or most of the girls, at least – are miserable about it, preferring instead to have a boyfriend and quickly transition into marriage. Despite the fact that young women are doing better than ever, professional commentators are still finding ways to problematize young women's lives. It's time to stop hooking up and embrace abstinence, they say. Marry young. Find a husband before you graduate.

It's conventional wisdom, but bad advice. The "hook-up culture is dangerous, early marriage is good" lectures are part of a backlash to feminist progress. We'd be far better off encouraging women – and men – to marry later, seek out equal partnerships and treat each other with respect, regardless of our sexual choices. And for a lot of young women, going a little wild isn't a bad idea either.

Yes, I said go a little wild. That doesn't mean do things that make you feel unsafe, or join in whatever you think your peers are doing. It means: don't let shame keep you from doing what feels good, right and freeing, sexually or otherwise. It means: reject a culture that shames sexual women, and don't participate in the shaming. Take calculated risks. Enjoy yourself.

For all that's been written about "hook-up culture" on university campuses, it's not clear that college students are in fact embracing promiscuity in lieu of traditional relationships. While many young people think that all their peers are getting laid constantly, the reality is that the vast majority of college students "hook up" – which can mean anything from making out to intercourse – twice a year or less. Sex with a relationship partner is twice as common as sex from a casual hook up. That's hardly the "promiscuity emergency" that authors like Donna Freitas, author of The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy, make it out to be.

"Traditions such as dates and get-to-know-you conversations before physical intimacy are deemed unnecessary or even forbidden."

While it's certainly true that a nice Harvard man is probably not going to come to your sorority house and offer you his fraternity pin as a token of sexual fidelity, it seems like a ridiculous overstatement to say that talking to each other before getting physical is forbidden on campus. What does seem to be the case is that students judge each other for "hooking up" but also think everyone is doing it, and young women, in particular, feel the attendant shame of being judged for their sexual choices – whether that choice is casual sex, abstinence or something in between.

What students need isn't a lecture on abstinence. They need a community that sees sex as about mutual pleasure and intimacy, not point scoring or getting something, and that doesn't shame or problematize female sexuality. Heterosexual women need male partners who are respectful, generous in bed and emotionally competent, and who treat women like people regardless of whether those women are girlfriends, one-night stands or friends with benefits. Sex, be it in a committed relationship or a more casual arrangement, doesn't have to be the fraught power play or unpleasant interaction merely tolerated by young women. Sex is sex. Human beings throughout all of history have enjoyed it for very good reason. Consensual, mutually pleasurable sex is, for many people, at the top of their "favorite things" list.

Feminist writer Jaclyn Friedman illustrated just how important a little wildness can be in her piece My Sluthood, Myself (and later in her book, What You Really Really Want), where she declared that sex when she needed it – just sex, on her terms – was liberating, healing and soul-fulfilling. The key? Self-awareness, community support and a step away from shame. Friedman knew her boundaries, and she had an idea of what she wanted to explore. Her self-awareness allowed her to pursue fruitful relationships, whether those were purely sexual or both sexual and romantic. Her group of friends offered support and helped to keep her both safe and sane.

Setting sex up as a commodity and simultaneously warning women that if they don't snag a man in college they'll end up lonely spinsters also has the handy effect of, at best, keeping women in constant doubt about their choices, and sometimes of derailing their other plans. In fact, women who marry in their 30s make significantly more money than women who marry younger. Couples who marry later also have lower divorce rates. A woman who is college-educated, marries after the age of 25 and has an independent income has only a 1 in 5 change of her marriage ending in divorce.

Telling women to marry their college sweethearts is bad career advice, bad financial advice and bad relationship advice.

My promotion of a little adventure, whatever that means – hooking up, having sex, making out, traveling alone, taking risks, quitting your job, experimenting sexually, embracing celibacy – is fundamentally premised on the dual ideas that you only get one shot at life so you should make it count, and also that pleasure is intrinsically valuable. Too much of how we seek to feel good comes from outside approval and from obtaining the right social markers of success – a husband, a boyfriend, a handbag. And too much of how women are deemed good or bad people comes from behaving in the right way in order to get those markers – being sexy but not too sexual, carefully avoiding prudishness but having marriage in mind as the long-term end-game.

To hell with that.

Americans are on this planet, on average, for nearly 80 years. If we're halfway intelligent or at least halfway interesting, we change and evolve over those decades. We're shaped by our experiences, including our sexual and romantic ones. Why, then, are we telling women to hold off on sexual experiences and instead rush into legal and emotional commitments that we all hope to last a lifetime? A life-long relationship with another human being is one of the most difficult, ambitious and transformative adventures one can embark upon, and it's best entered into by two people who have each spent some time getting to know themselves, overcoming challenges and living independently.

Why encourage women who have been on the planet for barely two decades to experiment less, be more prudent and commit as quickly as possible, to the detriment of their careers, their finances and even their relationships? Instead, experiment more. Figure out what you want in all areas of your life by trying out a lot of different things, in the bedroom and outside of it. A little hooking up isn't a bad thing. It would be even better in a culture that fully embraced pleasure, sexual and otherwise.